The Future Is Now.

So, we ended up celebrating the holiday weekend in the children’s portion of Duke Hospital’s ER. My oldest, Elias, broke his arm swinging from some monkey bars on Sunday afternoon. It was a pretty traumatic experience for everyone involved– we’re doing so much better today, but, woah, those first twelve hours were horrible. I spent both Sunday and Monday night crammed next to him in a twin bed, waking up every hour or two to check that his arm was elevated properly so his fingers didn’t swell, and making sure he hadn’t vomited on either of us. By about three or four in the morning, I could hardly get back to sleep. I laid awake and stared at the bottom slats of the top bunk, listening to him breathe. The fear and the sadness had come and gone, and I felt surprisingly grateful. Humbled. I was amazed that something so serious can be so easily fixed, and that humans have come so far in their understanding of medicine and the human body. Like, what an age we live in. I rubbed Eli’s back, and was flooded with gratitude that he was ushered into a place like this:

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and treated with insane tools like this:

This is a virtual X-ray machine. They could actually see the bones in his arm as they were being set. I didn’t even know this kind of technology existed, and hospitals are using it every day.

It made me wonder what else I’d been missing in the medical field lately. I did a little research this morning on that topic, and came up some incredibly cool advancements. Behold:

GENE-DRIVEN MEDICATION

This is kind of a cheat, because I already knew about this. My husband is a systems engineer for a company that does pharmacogenomics. It’s so fascinating, though, and becoming much more popular (for instance, the AmpliChip CYP450 was featured in ‘Wired’ magazine in 2007). The idea behind pharmacogenomics is that your genes affect how you react to various medications, and by examining your DNA, they can tell if you’ll have certain side effects. It’s still very new technology, and– as I understand– pricey, so while it will probably be experimental in my adulthood, it may see use in our child’s futures.

IMMORTALITY

Heh. I kid. Kind of. There’s these things called telomeres, which are repeating sequences at the end of your DNA. They become shorter with each cell division, and when they become too short, the cell stops dividing and dies. Geron Corporation has released TA-65 to the public, which is a telomere-targeted pill that boasts the ability to slow down cell aging. (Telomerase inhibitors are also being tested to fight cancer. Trial vaccines are ongoing at– where else– Duke University.)

MIND CONTROL

Neural implants have been a source of movie plots for years, but BrainGate has actually made progress with the concept. A sensor implanted on the brain has already allowed a paralyzed patient to move a mouse cursor with his mind the same way we would use our hands. Next in development is the ability to control limb movement in people with severe motor disabilities.

And, as kind of a nice sidenote, there was progress made in April with lab mice injected with the Wnt protein. The protein occurs naturally in animals, and serves to regenerate tissue after an injury. Both Wnt engineered mice and lab mice given the Wnt protein healed broken bones over three times as fast as regular mice. Wnt is being explored right now as a legitimate alternative to stem cells. This link has a breakdown of how quickly a broken bone would heal if Wnt proteins proved safe and fit for human use: Elias could be back on the playground in as little as a week and a half.

I’m excited to see where research takes us– hopefully to a healthier, happier tomorrow. In the meantime, I’ll be bringing prescription drugs to my little second-grader at school. His arm is hurting him again.